a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data communications technologies for transmitting/receiving, via a network, musical performance data of electronic musical instruments and audio and visual data.
b) Description of the Related Art
As a standard specification for interconnection between electronic musical instruments and between electronic musical instruments and tone generators, a musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) is known. So-called Internet concerts are also known. MIDI performance data output from electronic musical instruments played by players in a concert hall is distributed in the Internet and reproduced by a computer or MIDI instruments in each home as a reception terminal. In some of Internet concerts, in addition to MIDI performance data, other data such as image data (still and moving images) showing performance scenes of players or audiences in the concert hall and audio data (live sounds) are also distributed to the Internet. Each person can listen to the performance as if players are playing in his or her home.
MIDI data of an Internet concert is input and distributed to the network, independently from sound/image data. Therefore, in some case, sound/image data is reproduced at each home asynchronously with MIDI data. For example, during reproduction at each home, an image of a player depressing a key is displayed on a monitor after the sound of received MIDI data is reproduced, or musical tones of MIDI data generated by musical instruments are reproduced asynchronously with vocal sounds of sound data generated by microphones.